You’re not limited to putting “friends” into lists. You can file business pages into lists, too. First you have to create a Facebook list. Just how do you create a list in Facebook, anyway? Glad you asked. 🙂

First, go to your personal profile. Unfortunately, you can’t do this yet from your business fan pages (in the immortal words of Chris Berman, “C’mon, Man!”).

Get to your news feed (otherwise known as “Home.” You can see the link for “Home” on the top right of your page).

On the left side of your news feed, you’ll see categories: Pages, Apps, Lists etc. Hover your mouse over the word “Lists,” and you’ll see “More” to the right of “Lists.” Click on “More.”

Click on the “Create List” button on the top right of the lists.

Type the name of the list you want to create on Facebook into the box that pops up.

Click on “Add Friends.”

Now to create a list on Facebook that contains business pages instead of friends, click on the down arrow in the upper left corner where you see “Friends.”

Choose “Pages.”

Check the business pages you want to put into your list. Hit “Done” and you’re done!

Now anytime you’re on your Facebook Home page (also known as your news feed), you can choose that list from the left side of your Home page and you will see the posts of the fan pages you put into that list.

Recently I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting circled on Google Plus a lot. I also noticed that if I’m not on G+ every day, I miss some of those notifications. I think the reason I’m not seeing all the notifications is that when new circle notifications come up, the old ones disappear in favor of the new ones.

I saw these two Google Plus Circles Notifications in my Gmail (on the left in screenshot), but not in my G+ notifications (on the right in screenshot).

If you don’t want to miss any Google+ circle notifications, here’s a one minute tip for you to help make sure you check all your Google+ circle notifications.

First, go to your G+ notifications and click “Added you on Google+.”

G+ Circles notifications are typically shown in Notifications - but not all Circles notifications are at the top.

At the bottom of the list, click “View all circle notifications.”

When you click on "View all circle notifications," you will see all the G+ circle notifications.

After clicking “View all notifications,” click “More” at the bottom. You may be surprised how many notifications you missed.

Google+ Circles notifications continue past the first page; if you click "More" you will see more circles notifications.

G+ Circles notifications go beyond the first page. I hit "More" three times before finding these notifications that I had originally seen in my Gmail inbox just today.

As you can see, there are a LOT of folks I need to circle back!

You can also check your email notifications. They won’t disappear and it ensures you’ll receive all your Google+ Circle notifications. That’s how I first discovered I was missing Circle notifications.

Do you have any questions, or any tips to share? We’d love to hear from you!

If you’d like to share an article with Facebook friends or fans, but you don’t like the title or description, you can rename it. You can change the title and description while posting an article to your Facebook wall.

First, click “Link” above your Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” box.

Copy and paste the link that you want to share into the box and click “attach.” The article title, description and usually a thumbnail photo will appear.

Before you hit “Post,” double-click on the title. A box will show up, and you can type a new title.

Do the same for the description below the article title.

Hit “Post” and you should see it on your wall with the new title and description. Pretty cool, huh?

Have you “liked” too many Facebook business pages and now you can’t see posts from your favorite pages because of all the other Facebook fan pages’ posts? You can set your favorite Facebook fan pages as “featured likes” on your own biz page to make it easy to follow your favorite Facebook pages.

Featured Likes are on Facebook biz pages only, not on personal profiles. You have to be a Facebook business page owner to see “Likes” in the lower left area on your business page wall.

Here’s a one minute tip on how to choose your featured likes. Go to your Facebook business page’s wall. In the upper right corner, hit “edit page.”

On the left side of the edits page, click “Featured.”

At the top of the page you’ll see the area for Featured Likes. Click “Edit Featured Likes.”

Click on as many as you’d like, hit “Save” and you’re done!

Five of your Featured Likes will show on your wall at any given time. From there, you can click on them as they appear to follow your favorite Facebook business pages.

Or, go to Edit Page/Featured, where you can see 7 of your Featured Likes at a time and click on them from there.

Note: you have to be on your own fan page wall to see your featured likes. If you’re on another business page wall, you will see their featured likes.

Many thanks to S. Hughes and the man-eating beasts over at Planet Shark for suggesting we feature this coolly tip.

What makes a good password? My bank sent me a great article and I thought I’d share the main tip with you. Here are the steps to create a strong password:

1. Start with a sentence that you will remember. Eg: I hope the UConn Huskies win!
2. Remove the spaces from the words: IhopetheUConnHuskieswin!
3. Shorten some words: IhopetheUCHwin!
4. Capitalize some letters.
5. You can also use just the first letter of each word: IhtUCHw!
6. Add a memorable number. My bank suggests using something like the last 4 digits of a childhood phone number: IhtUCHw1379!

Now that’s one heck of a strong password. And, what makes it easy for me to remember is that I started out with a sentence. Cool, huh? Do you have a system you use to create passwords? Please share it with us!

Friends' lists that used to be under the "Most Recent" drop down menu are now on the left side of your news feed page.

Facebook introduced a few changes over the last couple of weeks, including: “Subscribe;” Share features (public, friends, custom); new Update Status tool; Fine Tuning your news feed; adding New Lists for us (thank you very much); view who is sharing your posts; Smart Lists; and a “Needs Review” function. (Click here to see a photo gallery explaining each new functionality.)

Now Facebook plans to unleash a major profile upgrade on Thursday. Most of the upgrades are unfortunately geared for personal profiles and one major industry. But there is some good news for the small business owner.

Two Major Changes

The first upgrade, Mashable reports, is that Facebook wants to make profiles “stickier;” or friendlier so that users stay on the profiles longer.

Here at In Touch Promotions, we wonder if this stickiness will extend to business pages. After all, Facebook has in the past made other upgrades that are still not functional for business pages. For example, the photo “tagging” functionality Facebook added in May 2011 still doesn’t work well for business pages. We can’t tag many of the pages we “like” to our photos. When we try, we get a list of odd suggestions like “Dr. House” and other pages that have nothing to do with us or the pages we like. (Click here to see our initial Facebook biz page photo tagging experiment.)

Until Facebook fixes these glitches, business pages will not be able to effectively use photo tagging. And tagging is becoming more important as more startups like Stipple emerge to help businesses use a photo labeling function to sell directly from their tagged, licensed photos.

But, if Facebook can figure out a way for your fans to “stick” longer on your business page, you will have a better opportunity to connect with and sell to your fans.

The other big reported upgrade is Facebook’s new “music and media platform,” which will use partners like Spotify to stream music for you from within Facebook. Facebook may also partner with someone like Netflix to stream video – so far we do not know when that will be launched.

What does this new functionality mean for businesses? Well, if you’re a musician or a movie star it’s good news because every time a user listens to your music or watches your movie, their status will be updated, all their friends will see that they are listening to you, and their friends will have a link to your music too.

But, if you’re a small business trying to make a go of it on Facebook, we don’t yet see how you will benefit from the new Spotify partnership. This new upgrade seems to help big business but leaves the little companies behind.

Advantages for Your Business

CNN Tech added to Mashable’s report: Facebook may be moving into a larger “social ecommerce” platform. Okay, CNN, we call it F-commerce. You know: selling on Facebook. Setting up a shopping mall on your Facebook business page. F-commerce.

Two aspects of Facebook’s new F-commerce push: Facebook will increase their marketing of Facebook credits and will add mobile platform “Project Spartan.” This is great news for small e-commerce businesses.

But, if you sell on your website, and want to sell on Facebook too, you can do that already. One easy and free platform we use for our clients is Shopping Mall by Payvment, which adds your products to your Facebook page and ties them into a shopping cart using PayPal for checkout. An added bonus: your products get listed in the overall shopping mall, too!

The advantage to the new upgrade is that Facebook will endorse F-commerce now more than ever, and encourage people to purchase from Facebook pages on a larger scale. So if you haven’t already, now would be a good time to think about selling on Facebook. Contact me anytime – DonnaSaliter@InTouchPromotions.com – if you have any questions about how to set up your F-commerce site.

6 Ways Facebook Can Help Small Businesses

If Facebook wants to be more business friendly, it’s going to have to make business pages more functionable. Some first steps we’d like to see Facebook work on:

Improve our ability to tag other businesses in our photos.

Let us comment on outside blogs as our business pages instead of having to change to our personal profiles.

Pages should have lists, like personal profiles do, so we can sort and segment other pages’ posts on our news feeds.

Put our own “recent activity” posts at the bottom and our wall posts at the top of our wall pages so that those of us who actively engage with other pages can do so without our own posts being hidden on our own walls.

Send us notifications when others comment on a post that we commented on so we can continue the conversation.

Give us the ability to edit posts instead of having to delete them when they need editing.

We should start sending Facebook our list of wants and needs. In fact, I think I’ll do just that. What other features or improvements do you want to see Facebook add for your business page?

Facebook had some problems this weekend. Many of us couldn’t see more than one page in our news feeds. I got this message: “This stream is unavailable at this time. Please try again soon.” With all the work business pages have to do to keep up with our social media marketing, I wondered what to do? in the absence of the Facebook news feed. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

To access pages this weekend and comment on their posts, I had to click on the links to businesses’ profile pages, since they weren’t showing up in my news feed, since my news feed wasn’t showing up. There was no other way to get to those pages that I love to engage with and rely on for great posts.

I decided to go to my profile page, thank God it was still loading :), click on my “223 people like this” link on the left of the profile page to access my fans, then in the upper left-hand corner of the pop-up box, hit the drop down arrow and select “pages.” The box then lists all the business pages that “like” my page. I could click on my faves to comment on and like their posts.

It was then that I made some very interesting discoveries.

First of all, 65 business pages like my page, http://www.facebook.com/InTouchPromotions. Some of these pages are new likers to In Touch Promotions and others had been fans for awhile and I just didn’t know it. I went to them right away to like them and post on them that I looked forward to following their posts. It’s very important to me to engage with those pages that are fans of mine.

I learned that I don’t see all the posts from all the pages all the time and I do miss out on some posts even when I’m on FB all day checking that news feed.

I also realized that some of the pages that I comment on regularly are not likers of my page. I decided to cut down on posting comments on these pages’ posts, since increasing page engagement with my page is my goal. If they’re not likers of my page, they can’t comment on my page. So, after a point, it doesn’t help me to keep commenting on their posts. Sometimes their fans become my fans, so it’s important to balance that fine line between spending time commenting on pages that won’t comment back and concentrating on those pages that engage with mine.

Lesson learned for me: to increase others’ engagement with my wall posts, I have to constantly reach out to those pages who like my page, and comment on their wall posts. Part of that is monitoring new business-page likers of my page, and returning the favor – much like on Twitter.

When was the last time you looked to see which business pages like your Facebook page? Chances are there are cool pages that you don’t even know are following you and could give you a chance to increase your fans and engagement with your Facebook biz page. Literally a blessing in disguise!